


if dying young won't change your mind

by sunsmasher



Series: HSWC Fills [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Radiation Sickness, Superheroes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 16:09:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>April, 1986, in the Ukraine. </p><p>Deformed piglets weren't the only thing to come out of Chernobyl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if dying young won't change your mind

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt: 
> 
>  
> 
> _Jade/John/Dave/Rose (pale)_  
>     
> April 1986, Ukraine, Chernobyl accident.
> 
>  
> 
> Title is (sort of) from Vampire Weekend's Diane Young. Warning for emetophobia.

Zhanna is a senior technician.  She’s in the reactor room, trying to manually sink cracked control rods into the reactor pool.

Ruza and David are engineers. They’re deep in the subbasement bubbler pools, trying to open the sluice gate to prevent a steam explosion.

Ivan is a fireman. He’s on the roof of reactor station four, trying to stop the flames from blowing reactor three’s cooling systems.

They’re all going to fail. On the plus side, they’re all about to become superheroes.

 ---

Zhanna can taste metal in her mouth. The bent and buckled steel walls of the hallway she’s tearing down have yet to actually burst, so she’s thinking she’s got radiation poisoning.  The foreman in front of her, leading her and the electrician she’s got at her heels to the control room, ducks into a soupy grey cloud of dust and radioactive steam. Zhanna sucks down a breath and follows up the stairs. Hot grit clings to her hair and scorches her face.

Well, if she wasn’t dying already she sure is now.

They’re on level 35 and steam is pouring into the control room. Everything’s fried, every backup generator kaput, and the foreman is screaming they’ll have to lower the rods manually. Zhanna is damn sure this isn’t going to work for a whole host of reasons, but she can feel the becquerels frying her skin even at this distance so there isn’t much point arguing. Either they stop this here, or they die trying to get to the turbine hall. Might not even be the radiation that gets them, considering the shaking that razed her office and the rubble that’s knocked some poor shift leader’s brains across the control room floor. Zhanna pauses to thumb his eyes closed before the foreman screams her name and she’s vaulting graphite rubble and burning linoleum through three heavy steel doors towards the reactor.

The foreman himself is holding open that last, massive door to the reactor hall, and she can see his skin browning where it touches the metal. She claps a grateful hand to his shoulder as she runs past.

The electrician, Kudryavstev, he’s already inside, gaping at the damage. One of the shield’s been thrown lose, slammed into the reactor shaft, and brilliant blue fires rage from the hole into the core. Woefully ineffectual fire hoses dangle from the upper balconies, their firemen probably long gone, and there, on the far side of the hazy, burning chamber, is the control rod mechanism.

Even before they’ve skirted the rubble and gotten their hands on the levers, Zhanna knows it’s pointless. She can see the mechanism is jammed, the control rods fractured and skewed in the reactor core. The fuel shielding is so much dust and what little coolant remains is boiling away in great gouts of steam.

“Go!” she shouts suddenly, releasing the levers and pulling at Kudryavstev’s coat. His face is pale when he turns to her, and she could have sworn his blue eyes were brown earlier today. They’ve both been peering into reactor cores, and she wonders if she’s changed, too.

“We’ve got to leave, ma’am, you can’t stay!” he shouts back, over the alarms and the hoses, “There’s nothing you can do here!”

She shakes her head. “There’s always something! I can always do something!”

Kudryavstev doesn’t attempt to argue. He’ll be feeling the radiation killing him, too, and he doesn’t know Zhanna well enough to care about her heroics. He runs for the door, waving to the foreman, and Zhanna turns back to the controls.

She looks into the core, and feels her eyes burning.

The ground is shaking.

\---

Ruza’s lost feeling in her face. It’s all pins and needles as she fumbles up the zip on her diving suit, and as she watches David drop his aqualung for the third time, she knows he’s feeling it, too. This hasn’t stopped him arguing, of course.

“—take that fucking suit off. If you think I’m letting you jump into the pitch-black radioactive death sauna then you’re as dumb as whatever American buttmonkey thinks we’ve got a functioning nuclear program, don’t they look stupid now—“

“David, get your mask on.”

“—the point is, don’t be that American buttmonkey, there’s no way in hell you’re getting in that pool while I’m still alive—“

“Well, that’s a problem quickly resolved—“

“Jesus, Ruza, don’t joke about this shit, I already puked twice on the way down here.”

Ruza sighs and presses a palm to her eyes. David looks resolute in the filmy light of the emergency lights set into the floor, if a bit peaky, but he’s also a self-sacrificing idiot. Not that she has any room to talk, but at least she has yet to add pig-headed chivalry to her list of offenses.

“Do you know where the sluice gates are?” she asks.

“Ok, no, but—“

“Can you open them while also keeping hold of the lantern?”

“I resent both the tone and content of these questions, you’re still not—“

“I’m coming with you,” Ruza says, eyes flinty. “In fact, I’m going to lead the way, and you’re going to follow quietly behind with the lamp until I show you where to pull. We have _minutes_ until the corium lava burns through the reactor floor to the upper pool, triggers another steam explosion, and ejects yet more radioactive material out of the core, possibly compromising the other large nuclear reactor next door. It’s my intention this does not happen, which means we’re both taking a dip in the death sauna.”

“But I don’t want you to die,” David replies, suddenly wretched.

With a herculean effort, Ruza doesn’t roll her eyes. “That’s very sweet, Mr. David, but we’ve known each other perhaps two days. We can realize our perfervid devotion to one another and embark upon a disastrous, torrid affair that will no doubt end in our tragic and early deaths _after_ we save the Soviet Union, but not a moment before. Put your mask on.”

She wonders how a man can appear so long-suffering when, again, they’ve only known each other two days.

The water, when they jump in, is awful. Freezing cold and thick with debris from the fire hose’s runoff, the lamp in David’s hand illuminates a circle not even a meter around as Ruza leads them deep into the black. She can’t feel the rumblings of the plant this far beneath this surface, but when David appears in her peripheral vision, his black wetsuit is spotted white. Hydrogen peroxide, she thinks, hydrolyzed by the radiation. Either another cooling pipe had ruptured or the firefighters’ runoff had collected some scattered fuel particles on its way to the bubbler pools. They aren’t going to live to see the medal ceremony, she realizes grimly.

The water’s getting harder the swim through. There’s too much silt and too little light. The lantern flickers for a second, and she feels David’s sudden grip at her kicking foot, but they can’t stop now. They’ve been swimming for maybe 90 seconds. She knows the plans well (she’s a turbine engineer, how well could she possibly know them, they’re going to die in the cold and the dark), and she knows the pipe and the gate can’t be more than another twenty seconds away. The reactor floor is thick, they have to have at least another minute before the corium can burn through to the upper pools and flash it all to radioactive steam.

She doesn’t feel heat on her back. The water is still cold, she knows it’s still cold. Her mind is playing tricks on her.

The lamp flickers again, and again, and goes out.

David’s hand on her leg is a claw she can feel through her wetsuit, there’s bubbles pouring from her mask as she screams, but the light doesn’t return and they’re lost in the close, claustrophobic dark. Ruza surges forward, reaching for the pipe she knows must be there, but her fingers touch only flecks of irradiated rubble. She kicks out again, and again, David releasing her leg to grip at her hand, but there’s still nothing and she’s starting to forget which way is up.

Her foot brushes something solid and unmoving, and she twists back to grab the pipe, pulling David around with all the strength she’s got. She doesn’t know where they are, or if the sluice gate is to the right or left, but when she reaches out with the hand David hasn’t got in a death grip, she grazes what must be a handle, or maybe a hinge.

She could cry for joy, but then everything goes hot, white, and loud.

\---

Ivan’s starting to feel sick, but that could be nerves.  His mouth tastes like metal, too, but his teeth are about a quarter inch into his lip, so that might be the blood. He doesn’t have an explanation for the way it feels like his face has fallen asleep, but his dad always told him a stressful environment made for poor health, and here, hauling himself up the ladder with his gloves full of sweat and his lieutenant screaming from at him from the edge of the roof, his first time ever responding to a call at the power station (and the boys who’d been laughing about electrical fires have stopped laughing), rough, dusty smoke thick in the air as flames lick at the sky, he thinks this could count as a stressful environment.

He pauses at the lip of the roof, which earns him another round of shouting, but he can’t help but stare. The colossal tower of the reactor shaft is cracked and crumbling, vomiting storms of dust and steam into the night as chunks of grey rock burn holes in the roof and send fires racing for the surrounding buildings.  The air’s glowing blue all around the shaft and at the edges of the dust clouds, and it looks to Ivan like something from his favorite hokey sci-fi movies made real. It’d be much nicer in a movie, though, without all the screaming and smoke.

One of the men from the Pripyat brigade shoves a hose into his hand and points Ivan towards the reactor shaft. Ivan gulps and runs where he’s told, trailing the hose out behind him in leaping coils as he barrels around the smoking rubble cast across the roof, dodging the other men trying to contain the fire before it can make the jump to the intact reactors.

Ivan’s not entirely stupid, though he does like hokey movies and tends to smile a lot.  He knows what he’s running around in is pretty bad, and he saw the team they relieved. They hadn’t been looking so good. They were kinda puking a lot. And he knows his target, the big glowing reactor that’s also on fire, has definitely got something to do with all the puking going on. The flames it’s kicking up aren’t just hot like most fire he’s fought is hot, but it burns and bites at his exposed skin like a gust of needles blown into his face. He’s pretty sure this is the last fire he’s gonna put out. But Ivan’s dad, for all his warnings of “hazardous working conditions” and “inadequate workers’ comp,” also told his son to always make decisions he could be proud of. His dad had told him that real duty of a man was to live fully and busily for as long as he could, but that if he had to die, let it be an unjust death.

Angling the hose into the vast cavern of the reactor, the water just barely catches the edge of the blue flames crawling up the sides of the shaft. It doesn’t seem to do much, but Ivan holds it steady just in case. He doesn’t know if he’s a hero like the men who’ve got plaques on the station walls, but he doesn’t think he’s done too bad, all told. He could maybe be proud of himself. His dad always was.

His eyes are watering and he’s definitely going to puke soon. The shouting seems to have died down a bit, and with the exception of the core fire, it sounds like most of the burns have been put out. Barring something super ridiculous, like another explosion in the reactor, it looks like the rest of the plant is safe.

Deep in the reactor hall, between the tongues of teal flame, Ivan sees someone move. It looks like a woman, her thick black hair almost grey with dust, and she’s alone, fighting with a control panel Ivan doesn’t recognize. He leaves the hose pointed at the flaming core, and drops to his knees at the hole in the roof, shouting at her to move. She’s miles away, of course, can’t hear a thing, but he can see her head turning between the open core and the mechanism, core to mechanism, mechanism to core, and then she looks down at the floor.

She must hear the _KA-CRACK_ before Ivan does, because she’s already running for the door when a noise like mountains breaking slams Ivan full in the face. He reels back, hands over his ears, but he can still see the reactor floor buckle and warp, feels the roof he’s sitting on begin to give, and then there’s steam.

Steam and explosions and noise and pain and heat and terror and for a brief, precious moment, the sensation of flight.

\---

Somehow, Ivan wakes up. When he does, he’s not alone. 

\---

The Chernobyl Four emerged on the global stage during cleanup operations. The Politburo tried to keep them quiet for a while, refused to answer questions on the basis of national security and state secrets, but the Four didn’t appreciate that. Besides, the things they did, the powers they wielded, not even the famously tight-lipped USSR could keep that under wraps.

The political scientists, the ones who’d write their dissertations on this stuff fifteen years down the line, they’d theorize that Gorbachev’s _glasnost_ was just a buzzword until the Four came along. Echidna, she moved over 5,000 tons of lead and boron to snuff out the reactor core fire. Just got the others to clear the area (Typheus could really project, you know?), raised her hands above her head, and dropped a couple kilotons out of nowhere. Not even the Cold War could keep America away from that kind of power.

Nor could you keep them away from the rest of the world. They made base near the old plant, though they never explained why (some say they’re trying to decontaminate the area, or recontaminate it, or summon their heathen alien gods, but you ask what locals are left and they’ll tell you Zhanna always just loved the forest), but they didn’t come home often. They traveled the world, doing good and righting wrongs. Some of the things they fought were things like themselves, the other unexpected consequences of the nuclear age, but just as often they would stop a skyjacking or save a town from flood.

They met the Fantastic Four, once, during a joint “diplomatic mission” to Latveria. There were a lot of jokes about the names. The Chernobyl Four have freely admitted to not being attached to theirs, considering it was the brainchild of a Moscow journalist they’d never met.

A new name doesn’t seem to be high on their to-do list, though. There’s a spaceship landed in Central America last night, and twelve aliens crawling out of it and calling themselves gods. They’ve got powers, too, ones not dissimilar to the Four’s.

The Four don’t seem to be too worried. They were on camera when the aliens sent out their broadcast, receiving some medal or another in St. Petersburg. You have to slow down the tape to see it, but you can see the other three turn to Cetus, and she just grins. There’s no sound over the crowd, but it looks like her lips say, “Finally.”


End file.
